Gwendolyn pulled back. ‘Shame on you, papa. Baby is Naham.’

Inside, he patted Rayner on the head, kissed Sarah and said he’d like to take a look at ‘little Naham’. Sarah flounced away from him and ran upstairs. Jonathan stood there a moment, staring after her.

‘You’re silly,’ said Rayner, my father-to-be, who was to lecture on the economics of war at the University of California at Berkeley, and to leave his children $2 million.

‘Well, what is his name?’ Jonathan asked.

Rayner lifted the one eyebrow that was to become the terror and the delight of his students. ‘Won’t tell you.’

‘Why not?’

Rayner eyed him up and down. ‘’Cause you’re silly.’

‘So are you,’ Jonathan said angrily. ‘I’ll call him Atlas. God knows, he’ll need some endurance to survive around here.’ Thus it was that my uncle Nathaniel, the doctor, came to be known as Atlas, who – as Heine puts it – bears on his back the weight of this world of sorrows.

My father-to-be retreated up the stairs after his mother and cried ‘You’re silly’ once more from the safety of her skirts.

‘Why does he dislike me so much?’ Jonathan asked Sarah one night a year or so later when Rayner was six or seven years old. For all my grandfather’s passionate love of his children (and of this the diaries leave no doubt whatever), he had no idea – absolutely none – of what a normal child, a child not brought up as a slave, might need or want. The children worked hard on the farm, many long hours every day, though not anywhere near as long and hard as he had worked. He built swings for them by the house; sometimes he watched them play, heart in throat, and wrote that he could not be working them too hard or too long if they had energy left over to play. ‘He just didn’t understand,’ Atlas said, ‘that it’s necessary for children to play.’

‘They tease Rayner at school,’ Sarah said to Jonathan.

He’d built the school for Hannaville with his own hands, for no pay, for no return at all except that his kids, goddamnit, were not going to be denied as he had been. ‘What are you saying?’ he said.

‘He has patches on his clothes.’ Sarah was pregnant yet again. She dropped her hands into her lap, a helpless, angry, despairing gesture, not like her really, and shut her eyes. ‘I’m so tired—’

‘You’re doing too much. You should get some rest.’

‘—and I’m afraid this time. It hurts so.’

‘What hurts? Where does it hurt? Show me.’

‘I don’t know. Everywhere.’

‘It must hurt some places more than others.’

‘Why must it?’

‘If something hurts,’ Jonathan said, ‘let’s get Burgess—’

‘Why do you always have to have a neat answer?’

‘There’s no point in talking to him if we can’t tell him what’s the matter.’

‘I don’t want another baby!’ she cried out. ‘Why can’t you leave me alone?’ But even as she spoke she snatched at his hands and kissed them. ‘Oh, Johnny, I couldn’t dig more than two rows today. I’ll never get the turnips in – Why don’t you talk to me anymore?’ she wept. ‘You shout at the children. You hit Rayner—’